I decided to make some changes in the way of my blogging, preferring to appeal to both Turkish and English readers, hence today i just introduced the first entry in Turkish which is a book review. I won’t go for the word for word translation; instead i will give a short summary what has been talked above.

Accordingly, in this entry i reviewed a book by one of my favourite Turkish writers Elif Shafak. The book “Pinhan” is her first book getting the Mevlana award for her. I consider this book as a baseline where she laid the foundation for her newly released and quite popular books such as “Aşk”.

In her books you cannot find only one hero, heroine or villain because everyone strives to be more hero or to be more villain, or you can’t easily decide which event is more significant, or you can’t simply determine the main place and the time of the book, hence it is hard to find a routine introduction, development and a finalization part, since Shafak likes to deduce new starts from the ends thus all these items (and many more) are just interwoven. And Pinhan is one of these books.

It is mainly about a person named Pinhan who enters a lodge to discover himself both physically and spiritually, then the chain of events starts. We are given the chance to closely observe the lives of lodge and dervish, to witness spiritual journeys within a self, we are introduced to a whole city where the citizens think that they are punished by God as some misbehaved among them, we are made to taste both the eartly and the heavenly love. We see the bad in good and the good in bad simply.

Main feature of the book is the diversifications and varieties within a whole maintained throughout the whole story as it is clear that Shafak likes to escape from standardizations. The book also carries the traces of sufism and has the footprints of Mevlana which are the main hints for Shafak literary style.

In short, Pinhan is quite an absorbing one where you can easily lose yourself and when you find out yourself again, you realize how far you take a step.

2 Responses

i read all of her books except one (Flea Palace which is also in my 2010 read-list). But the thing is all my reads were in Turkish. I am quite curious about how she sounds in English. May be i can go for an English version for one of her books to see what taste i will get.
And yea i can recommend this one too.